The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made, Part 2 Noah Rothman
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/
I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.
“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”
With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.
Peter Kornbluh, the director of George Washington University’s Cuban Documentation Project, sets the stage for the October crisis by noting the extent to which America treated Latin America like “our backyard.” Legacy of Lies author Tim Weiner agreed. “Over and Over again, the United States is subverting governments in the name of American democracy,” he noted. It was that impulse that culminated in the botched Bay of Pigs operation designed to oust Castro. That, combined with the introduction of offensive nuclear weapons in Turkey and Italy, compelled Nikita Khrushchev to reciprocate in Cuba. The ensuing standoff was resolved with a well-known but, at the time, secret deal that forced the U.S. to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
The Cuba crisis, along with a brief note about the construction of the Berlin Wall, summarizes John Kennedy’s presidency. He is portrayed as a far-sighted peacemaker, though no mention is made of his introduction of U.S. advisors to Vietnam nor the debacle of a performance he turned in at the Vienna summit alongside Khrushchev (which is widely believed to have influenced the Kremlin’s decision to bifurcate Berlin in the first place). Lyndon Johnson is also oddly absent from the narrative retailed by Turning Point. One must assume that it was only through inertia that the world bore witness to an explosion of proxy conflicts during this period.
Those were too numerous to explore in detail: Nicaragua, Angola, North Yemen, The Dominican Republic, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mozambique, El Salvador, Congo, and so on. But Latin America’s battlefields enthrall the filmmakers more than, for example, Africa’s or Southeast Asia’s. That was also true of critics of American foreign policy in the 20th century, partly because that focus made it easier to indict the United States as the aggressor.
After all, U.S. foreign policymakers wanted to “use the Cold War as a rationale to intervene once again in countries that had already suffered decades, if not centuries, of U.S. intervention previously,” Kornbluh added. The narrative culminates in the Nixon-era overthrow of Chile’s “democratically elected” and legitimate president, Salvador Allende — a perpetuation of what the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady noted is the popular leftwing mythology around Allende’s democratic tendencies (a narrative that downplays his Soviet ties). From 1973 until today, Chile is presented as a basket case — a notion that would probably confound the average Chilean. But in that respect, it is much like modern Guatemala and Iran. “It’s remarkable the extent to which we abandoned those countries after we overthrew their governments,” says Overthrow author Stephen Kinzer. “You could say that about a lot of countries.”
Near the end of episode four, Johnson’s unnamed presidency is replaced by Richard Nixon’s. His contributions to the Cold War involve his pursuit of the wholly unimpeachable concept of Détente and some admirable arms limitation treaties with the Soviets (which, the documentary helpfully notes, the Soviets violated with the introduction of multiple-independent reentry vehicles, or MIRVs). The episode ends with the introduction of a popular American backlash to Nixon’s peacemaking. Enter Ronald Reagan.
At this point, I thought I might have been tricked again into assuming that the documentary had somehow simply skipped over the Carter presidency entirely. I concluded that it was better to wait for episode five before drawing that conclusion. And the following episode did touch on the Carter years, but only cursorily. Almost the whole of the Carter administration is distilled into two events: First, a false alarm in the summer of 1980, in which a faulty computer chip indicated an incoming volley of Soviet missiles. Second, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
That’s a shame, too. In glossing over the Carter era, Turning Point’s audience is deprived of an introduction to many concepts that dominated the Reagan years. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is presented as a perversion of the post-War compact in which the Soviets were allowed a free hand where they “liberated Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation,” according to author Timothy Naftali. That word “liberated” would not resonate with the Warsaw Pact nations subsumed under Soviet domination. Indeed, the very concept of a “captive people” inside the Soviet Bloc that so animated the intellectuals with whom Reagan surrounded himself is absent from this narrative.
Nor does this series on the Cold War dwell much on the evolving doctrines around nuclear warfighting. In episodes four and five, the series implies that the notion of “mutually assured destruction” prevailed throughout the conflict, but that is not so. It was in the Carter years that U.S. policymakers began to explore notions like self-deterrence — a phenomenon that could theoretically occur after an adversary had executed a counter-force nuclear strike, rendering retaliation suicidal. After all, the first striker still retained the capacity to take out so-called “value” targets — urban centers and the like — and the theory of “self-deterrence” posited that a victim of that strike would be more likely to surrender than risk wholesale destruction.
This theory led Richard Pipes, in 1977, to conclude that the Soviets had every reason to believe it could “fight and win a nuclear war.” It was a Carter-era nuclear posture review that began a process culminating in the “countervailing strategy,” which sought to counter what Nuclear Targeting Policy Review director Leon Sloss said was the consensus view that Soviet leadership “was planning seriously to survive a nuclear war.” That education would, however, complicate the notion that most Cold War-era tensions were the result of American provocations. Indeed, one of the worst of those provocations occurred under Reagan in 1983.
Under Reagan, the “same kind of fear that dominated American politics in the 1950s and 1960s” was “happening all over again,” one of the documentary’s participants submitted. Regan deployed Pershing II missile to Western Europe; deployments the film helpfully notes were, in fact, a response to the Soviet forward deployment of SS-20 missiles, thanks to some of its brightest lights, author Tom Nichols and former Defense Sec. Bob Gates. Reagan called the Soviets an “evil empire” and toyed with the prospect of intercepting Soviet missiles in space with lasers. The Soviets promulgated the idea that SDI was a first-strike weapon to its most reliable propagandists even though the Kremlin knew that it was technologically infeasible, though the film does not make that explicit assertion. Ultimately, a NATO-led naval exercise in the Western Pacific in which a fighter aircraft overflew an island in the Kuril archipelago led the Soviets to overreact. And they overreacted in the worst way by shooting down the commercial airliner, KA 007. Once again, the fault lies with America.
Throughout the series of crises that dominated 1983, Reagan is portrayed as a blind ideologue who only comes to his senses after a fortuitous viewing of the made-for-television movie The Day After. He antagonized the Soviets and engaged in the arms race with remarkable zeal. He made no overtures to his Soviet counterparts (he did) before Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the premiership. But Reagan and his movement are not the stars of episode five. Gorbachev is.
The new Soviet general secretary enters office confronted with the fact that 20 percent of Soviet GDP is devoted to defense spending and nuclear weapons maintenance despite growing domestic shortages of staple and consumer goods. But it was not until the disaster at Chernobyl that Gorbachev became convinced that the Soviet system had to change. Here, viewers are confronted with one of the biggest points of contention among post-Soviet scholars: were Gorbachev’s reforms motivated by his assessment of the USSR’s material conditions, or did ideational changes within the Politburo incept those reforms? Was it Glasnost or Perestroika that did the Soviet Union in for good? The episode leaves viewers with the distinct impression that it wasn’t anything Reagan did but the idea of liberality that sprang from Gorbachev’s forehead that produced the conditions ultimately responsible for the Soviet Union’s demise. If I recall correctly, that’s where my liberal arts professors came down on the subject, too.
Episodes six through nine await. Stay tuned for the conclusion of this series.
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